Research on Vehicle Routing Optimization for Cold Chain Logistics with Flexible Multi-compartment

• 1、School of Management, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430065
• 2、Center for Service Science and Engineering, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, 430065

Abstract：Flexible multi-compartment vehicles can transport multiple types of products in a single trip and allow for adjustments to compartment sizes, enhancing transportation flexibility while also posing challenges for operational optimization. This paper addresses the transportation of cold chain products by integrating compartment capacity planning with route optimization for multi-compartment vehicles, establishing a mixed-integer programming model aimed at minimizing total costs. Based on the decision-making characteristics of the problem-including route planning, product allocation, and compartment capacity planning-three compartment adjustment operators and three local route search operators were designed, forming the basis of a hybrid ant colony optimization algorithm proposed to solve the problem. Simulation results demonstrate that the hybrid ant colony algorithm outperforms exact algorithms, genetic algorithms, large neighborhood search algorithms, and simulated annealing algorithms in overall performance. As the problem scale increases, the hybrid ant colony algorithm maintains its cost advantage, and the use of flexible multi-compartment vehicles contributes to reducing logistics costs.

Keywords： flexible multi-compartment vehicle cold chain logistics route optimization hybrid ant colony algorithm